SES AI Corporation

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's SES AI fourth quarter 2024 business and financial results. My name is Jayla, and I'll be your moderator for today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. And I'd like to turn the conference over to our host, Kyle Pinkleton. You may proceed.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our conference call covering our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results. Joining me today are Qi Chaohu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Jing Nilas, Chief Financial Officer. We issued our shareholder letter just after 4 p.m. today, which provides a business update as well as our financial results. You'll find a press release with a link to our shareholder letter and today's conference call webcast in the investor relations section of our website at ses.ai. Before we get started, this is a reminder that the discussion today may contain forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Such statements involve certain risks, assumptions, and uncertainties, which may cause our actual or future results and performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied in these statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially Our current expectations include but are not limited to those detailed in our latest earnings release and in our SEC filings. This afternoon, we will review our business as well as the results for the quarter. With that, I'll pass it over to Chi-Chao.

Thanks, Kyle. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter and fall year 2024 earnings call. Today, we are pleased to present an update on the new era for SES AI as we reap the benefits of our all-in-all AI strategy, deepen existing EV relationships, move to the next stage of our evolution to a revenue-generating company, and share our plans for additional revenue streams with new market expansion in drone robotics and battery energy storage systems, BESS. As you may have seen, we have made several announcements over the last several weeks, including that STS AI is reporting revenue for the first time in the fourth quarter. We are no longer a pre-revenue company and look forward to continuing on our commercialization path by growing revenue in 2025 and beyond. First, I would like to address the highlights in our EV space. Since the fourth quarter, we signed contracts totaling up to $10 million to develop AI-enhanced lithium metal and lithium ion batteries for EVs with two automotive OEM partners. These contracts solidify our relationships with our OEM partners and continue to demonstrate the value these partners see in the use of AI for battery material development. especially the value that an enhanced electrolyte can provide for both lithium metal and lithium ion batteries. Second, I want to address the important work we have accomplished in urban air mobility, or UAM, drones and robotics. In January, at the CES 2025 show, we unveiled an AI-enhanced 2170 cylindrical cell for humanoid robotics. Earlier in 2024, signed a significant purchase order with Data Blanket for drones for forest fire management and with SoftBank for HABS communications satellites. This was a game changer as these AI-enhanced 2170 cells are the first batteries to use an electrolyte discovered by SCS-AI's Molecular Universe effort, which maps the physical and chemical properties of the entire universe of small molecules suitable for battery electrolytes. 10 to the 11th molecules. Our human scientists and AI agent learned that there's great similarity between lithium metal and high silicon lithium ion cells in terms of electrolyte anode interfaces. And our development in lithium metal electrolytes could also address high silicon lithium ion challenges, especially swelling and cyclites. We are now in both lithium metal and high silicon lithium ion. 2170 is an industry standard format and is available on the large commercial scale. The electrical discovered through our molecular universe effort is a drop-in replacement. This allows us to have a capex light model through contract manufacturing and to deliver a high energy density and high power density cell for customers in humanoid robots, drones, EVs, power tools, and other applications. Third, SCS AI is planning to expand into a new and growing field, battery energy storage systems, BESS. Last month, we announced that SCS AI signed an MOU with AI specs targeting up to $45 million to provide up to 100 megawatt hours of advanced battery energy storage systems, BESS, solution with AI for safety first deployment at a crypto mining site in Texas. This relationship is the first of its kind for SAS AI, and we believe that this is something that can be replicated with additional partners in the future. This project will involve our battery safety platform, Avatar, which includes our AI for manufacturing and AI for safety solutions. Powering our commercial success are our two focus areas. Upstream Material Discovery, Molecular Universe, and Downstream Battery Safety, Avatar. In Molecular Universe, our collaboration with NVIDIA on GPU-enhanced computation chemistry software helped accelerate this effort to map the entire 10 to the 11th universe of small molecules from more than 8,000 years to just a few months. We have now mapped 10 to the 8th. 0.1% of the molecular universe. We think this is the world's largest single molecule density function theory database. And we're also mapping solution and interface levels. These unique proprietary synthetic data help train our AI model that will accelerate novel electrolyte discovery. As we have seen for lithium metal and high silicon lithium ion. and later even LFP cells for BSS and other chemistries. With Avatar, we have developed a new foundation model to monitor battery health and predict incidents before they happen. This AI-based model works in conjunction with conventional physics-based battery management system, BMS, but is agnostic to chemistry, form factor, emission profile, and currently has been pre-trained on manufacturing data and cycling data across a variety of cell chemistries, including NCM, LFP cathode, and high silicon graphite and lithium metal anode, and form factors including pouch, prismatic, and cylindrical, and mission profiles ranging from BSS to EV, drones, and robots. In closing, SESAI has seen some exciting advancements during the end of 2024 and at the start of 2025. especially with us recognizing revenue for the first time in our history. All in on AI is not only critical, but is the future. We see great things continuing going forward. Here are some of the things I see happening. The change in our business model. Originally, we envisioned CapEx heavy plants to manufacture cells for EVs and UAM at scale, and then offsetting some of the required costs through JVs. Now, our business model focuses heavily on selling our AI models and core battery materials, contract manufacturing of cells using our electrolyte, and selling of contract imported cells. A focus on hiring of AI scientists in sales and marketing teams to pursue greater expansion of revenue opportunities from 2025 to 2027. Continue evolution from a pre revenue easy focused battery technology company lever to one battery chemistry. To a company that can leverage its prior work, along with its Ai technology and Ai enabled electrolytes to generate revenue in a capex light model much earlier than anticipated and with an ability to tap to new. adjacent verticals that we believe will be much larger than EV. Thank you for your continued interest in SES AI, and now I'll turn it over to June for financial updates.